Resolution snafus...
 

I understand that to get 1920x1080 from this camera you need an HDMI cable. But I'm not even concerned about that... When I capture the m2t fil from my computer its in widescreen and 1440x1080. This video still looks widescreen, but a 1440x1080 document is not widescreen.

Here's where the problem comes-

I take the footage into After Effects. It says 1440x1080 29.97, etc. I interepret footage and guess pulldown. Now I have 1440x1080 24p footage...but its smushed together like 4:3 footage.

All I want is the same resolution of the m2t but with 24p. What's going on? Did they have to make everything difficult with this thing?

I thought it was the whole "square pixels" vs. "non-square pixels" difference?

Thats what I assumed too, but nothing I've done has made it work. Anyone have their AE workflow?

I ran into this same issue when I got my first Canon HDV camera.

You need to make sure you are using 1.33 size pixels. You are probably still using 0.9 which makes them look "smushed".

does anyone have a good answer to this? and how is everyone getting 1280x720 video? are you cropping parts off?

Make sure your footage interpretation pixel aspect ratio and the pixel aspect ratio of your composition MATCH. For example, I import my 24p-in-60i 1440x1080 footage into After Effects, hit Command/Control+F and guess the pull-down and set to Square Pixel. Then I drag the video to the new composition button which will force my new composition to 1440x1080 square pixel. I then select the composition in the bin and hit Command/Control+K and set the canvas size to 1920x1080 and finally resize my video to 1920x1080 in the timeline, now I have 1920x1080 full raster 24p material.

Is there a better way to do this? If so I don't know it.

Yeah, it's the whole square pixel versus non-square pixel issue.

In order to save bandwidth, they come up the idea of stretching each dot 33% (1.33) wider to create a widescreen format. This is not new. NTSC DV Widescreen use the same method to stretch a 720x480 screen to wide format by making each dot 20% wider (1.2).

I don't think that's a good way. You just force the program to interpolate each pixel to dupulicate more dots so you feel better as it's truly 1:1 square pixel. You won't be getting any better in picture quality.

If you are working on HDV project and all your clips are HDV clips, you should stick with 1440x1080 timeline with 1.33 pixel aspect ratio.

But sizing up to 1920x1080, your final video file size is a lot bigger but the quality won't be any better.

1280 x 720 is square pixels for HDV footage, 1440 x 1080 is 1.33 pixels... (which appears 1920 x 1080)

Make sense?